Tag: YALB

So today, bookmarks posted from delicious.com onto the Yet Another Linux Blog RSS feed. This isn’t normal…I don’t post bookmarks from that service here…in fact, I haven’t used them since they were bought out. I remember experimenting with bookmarks posting to your blog for the first month I had my delicious account…but never kept it on.

But suddenly, somebody’s bookmarks post and show up in the RSS feed here. For that, I apologize to my RSS readers. Rest assured, it shouldn’t happen again as I’ve deleted my delicious account.

Thanks for making Yet Another Linux Blog one of the top Linux Blogs on the planet! It was an average day over 8 years ago that I began to host my own blog at linuxblog.sytes.net (thanks No-Ip.com!) on a PII that I inherited from one of my friends. Slackware Linux hosted the project then and I wanted to use my new blog to explore the Linux world posting tips, tricks, and how-to’s on my way. Millions upon millions of pageviews and 6 hosting changes later, we arrive here…at the end of 2011.

So am I throwing in the towel since I didn’t post regularly in 2011? Heck no. I’m going to continue learning and posting, exploring and writing. In fact, I’ve made it a resolution to do more posting this year than I ever have to develop my writing as I begin to supplement my technical writing portfolio. Technical Writing would be my profession of choice if this were a perfect world…getting paid to help people is something I find very satisfying. For now, I freelance and am looking to possibly make freelancing become my full time job.

Once again, thanks for making Yet Another Linux Blog be a stop in your browser…thanks for making it be a blip on your RSS reader….thanks for your support and continued reading 🙂

Sometimes, you just have so many problems with the distribution you’re running that you have to wipe it out with a clean slate. I did that this past week and am now using Debian.

With using Debian there comes a feeling of being back to the very basic of Linux distros…much in the same way when you use Arch…it just feels plain, unencumbered, and basic and there is a feeling you get when build something from nothing…you start with a kernel and just enough CLI tools and create your house…then live in it.

It feels good to be stable. It feels good to not have to worry about programs crashing, the net disconnecting, or not being able to install programs.

People like to ride the unstable or testing route with most things out there…as I move forward in my Linux journey, I find myself looking to be less and less cutting edge and more and more stable. Plus, if there is a program out there that needs updating…backports are always a good way to get them.

I’m enjoying my new digs and will look to getting back into the swing of posting enjoyable articles and how-to’s in the upcoming weeks.

Very interesting statistics that I’ve noticed since moving the site to a Linode VPS.

If you take a look at the graphic below, the spike in the middle will probably stick out quite a bit. Oddly enough, the spike I noticed in CPU percentage used (which is regulated for VPS at Linode) also spiked up disk usage…mainly because I began to swap when cpu/ram use skyrocketed. All of this happened with Ubuntu 10.04 installed. CentOS was the first distro I tried but I quickly switched to Ubuntu when I spotted a really nice how-to in the Linode document library. Oh, and please excuse my horrible gimp skills on the image below…it was a quick and dirty editing of the image:

cpu usage

After switching to Ubuntu, I began receiving alarms for my account due to the high usage of CPU and disk. I attempted to tweak settings and configuration files for about a week and realized it just wasn’t going to work for me. I switched to Debian Lenny and the move was a positive as is reflected in these pictures.

disk usage

I was hoping Ubuntu 10.04 would fit for me since it is a long term support (LTS) release. CentOS is my normal server distribution of choice and I really wanted to branch out and go with something different. I used a Linode Stackscript for WordPress for CentOS but elected for vanilla installs of Ubuntu and Debian aftwards (I didn’t like NOT knowing what was installed when I first logged in…call me a control freak).

I just found it interesting that Ubuntu 10.04 did so horribly in this instance. After investigating, I found a couple of likely suspects:

Default Apache install in Ubuntu leaves a lot to be desired..even after tweaking both it and PHP for days I couldn’t get them to lay off the resources. Even switching to mpm_worker and FastCGI did little to settle things down.

Ubuntu swappiness is bad…it is set at 60 (I use 10 normally) and it swapped every chance it could get…it’s set by default to swap more than it should.

mod_php on Ubuntu is hungry for all your cpu and ram and disk; be warned!

Debian, as the parent distribution of Ubuntu, would most likely suffer from the same problems…except it doesn’t. Things are working great with it and I’d recommend it for any of your server needs! Has anyone else seen this oddity with Ubuntu 10.04? If so, please drop me a comment below.

For those of you who follow me here at Yet Another Linux Blog you might be wondering where I went the last month. I assure you I’m still here and I still use Linux every single day. I’m currently running both Arch Linux (32bit) and Unity Linux (64bit) on my main computer.

I’ve been working pretty hard through the holidays at my full time job where I am a server administrator for a medium sized hospital in the U.S. Recently (in December), I moved 2000+ users from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007. We considered farming out our Exchange environment to the cloud or perhaps going with Microsoft Exchange Hosting services but in the end, upper management decided they’d rather underpay someone to work exceedingly long hours with minimal training on a system not built by him. So, that’s why I’ve been pretty inactive as of late. As you can imagine working with Microsoft technologies…I always have something to fix and things are always unstable.

I know that some of you might be saying “why not use linux based exchange alternatives in your enterprise?” and I’d say, why indeed. But I inherited this beast and it’s been Exchange since Exchange came out. Not only that, but the primary application for all departments (ERM app) runs completely on Windows and plugs into Exchange and nothing else. Talk about vendor lock in eh? Well, it’s a job.

I used to work with Linux when I worked for rPath but parted ways with them about a year and a half ago when I had to move away to help out after a death in the family. I was very sad to leave but am very happy with the large pay increase that came with my current position. However, migrations do take their toll…lots of hours worked and frustrations vented. Now that I’m over the hump, I’ll be able to get back into a normal swing of things.

For those of you who might be Exchange administrators in your day to day work, I’ve begun blogging about my experiences and setup a community to share tips, tricks, powershell commandlets, and a place to talk shop. I figure if I have to work with closed source at least I can open source some help. Find my Exchange blog at http://teknologist.net

Thanks for hanging in there everyone, and sorry for the inactivity. Now that I’ve hit 6+ years blogging (in December) here I have even more incentive to continue sharing great Linux help with everyone. I’ve got some good tips directly in the pipeline and here’s to a great 2010!